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How right were the strawmen? Taking the linked graphic way too seriously, I think it's clear that the strawman is supposed to be an assertion of a causal relationship, right? Not just the bare "if X then Y", which is vacuously true if Y is something guaranteed to happen eventually, like a plague, or teachers being dumb.
My scoring would be:
Various plagues. Partial credit here: it's possible that modern acceptance of gay (relationships/marriage/whatever) exacerbated Monkeypox. (The counterargument is that removing stigma allows Public Health Inc to intervene more effectively. And also that the continent on which Monkeypox is most prevalent is... not famously accepting of gay anything.) There's nothing resembling a causal relationship with COVID though, and since that one's the main reason "plagues" are on our minds these days, only partial credit. Also I'm being generous by interpreting "plague" literally and ignoring the "locusts and frogs" thing.
The terrorists will win. Trying to be charitable, our (U.S.) horrid withdrawal from Kabul was a "win" for the terrorists. I'm not clever enough to construct a causal path from gay marriage to that, though. No points.
Third world war. Again being charitable, we have an elevated risk of a third world war today. I can think of possible causal paths, but none that I can unironically believe, so no points here either.
Schools will begin to teach... First, I have to be extremely charitable in ignoring the obvious ways in which the statement "schools are teaching..." is at best grotesquely misleading. I think the sensible reading of this strawman is not "married gay people will force schools to..." but rather a sort of slippery slope. I think it's true that there's a slope there, and it was slippery, but it's also true that once we hit the "parents don't have the right to a say in what their kids are taught" level, it became an excellent electoral strategy to run against this stuff. We're not falling into a trough of unbounded stupidity. Nevertheless it is the case that legalizing gay marriage probably made this broad category of thing common, so yes, partial credit here too.
In summary: not very right. With this amount of stretching, I can give any terrible theory partial credit. Par for the course for strawmen, but let's not give credit where it ain't due.
"It's not going to suck itself"
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Agree. Plagues: happen every hundred years at least for all of human history, covid was a very minor plague in comparison, monkeypox too, both were much better than AIDS or smallpox. Terrorists: terrorist have been winning for much of the past hundred years, again, no change. Third world war: ... these have also been constantly happening for the past hundred years, not causal. Schools teach: I don't think explicit homosexual sex is taught in any significant number of american schools.
Healthcare-assisted euthanasia is a poor example of right- ideas being correct, anyway. For starters, it's very uncommon, and even moreso for people who don't have terminal diseases / are old. And - innocent, weak people die all the time because of the state, says leftists. "people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged. Is it bad when a homeless person starves because the state didn't give them housing and welfare? What about when someone dies of some rare cancer "because" the state didn't give them the $500k experimental treatment? And those happen way, way more! It's not a very close comparison, but the much higher frequency of the latter, and the fact that in both cases, the end is 'innocent exploited person dies'...
Whereas something like low TFR, casual sex above having children, pointless simulacra consumer media culture, slave morality and last man, those are large-scale claims about society that every person is claimed to personally experience, and are thus much more important.
"He who does not work, neither shall he eat." -- Stalin. Also Lenin (Vladimir, not John). Incorporated into the Soviet Constitution, for what that was worth. Real reactionary, that bunch.
(it's from 2 Thessalonians; maybe that makes it reactionary regardless of its later uses?)
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As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever
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Largely agreed. I could still be swayed on euthanasia worries; I'm not sure why, but somehow it seems particularly bad to kill somebody and call it kindness. I haven't thought about it carefully enough to have proper thoughts though.
What does "last man" refer to? Not familiar with the phrase.
Nietzche's last man.
Seeking comfort, simple pleasure, comfort, and above all avoiding suffering.
"The last man's first appearance is in "Zarathustra's Prologue". According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves. After having unsuccessfully attempted to get the populace to accept the Übermensch as the goal of society, Zarathustra confronts them with a goal so disgusting that he assumes that it will revolt them – a culture which seeks only passive comfort and routine, avoiding everything that could potentially bring risk, pain, or disappointment.[1] Zarathustra fails in this attempt, and instead of repelling and manipulating the populace into pursuing the goal of the Übermensch, the populace take Zarathustra literally and choose the "disgusting" goal of becoming the last men. This decision leaves Zarathustra disheartened and disappointed."
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I must say I find more telling the way you feel the need to refute a strawman than the content of the argument.
I mean look at your response.
One is a "yes, but you're not thinking of it for the right reasons". Given mindreading is void of content, this reduces to yes.
Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included. Which was never going to work and made any collaboration a purely mercenary affair that collapsed as fast as you would expect. I could go on about this and how the Americans suck at imperialism compared to the Brits (and weirdly failed in Afghanistan for very similar reasons).
Three is certainly dubious, unless you fix the strawman and change gay marriage for "cede more terrain to progressive politics" and then it's unambiguous that the insane zeal for Ukraine as the new current thing is not coming from nowhere. But strictly speaking it hasn't happened and wouldn't happen because of that.
Four is the really outrageous one, since the strawman formulation, despite being a very strong claim to make, is literally true and accurate, and all you find to spin it is "yes but some people still oppose it" which frankly is ridiculous.
Overall, for something literally created to deform and discredit conservative arguments, I think that's a impressively good score. I wouldn't start betting money on reverse-progressive-memes, but it certainly bolsters the thesis that the conservatives of yore were at least directionnally accurate.
How much did they spend? I don't think the Americans ever tried to make Afghanistan into a progressive utopia. They just wanted a more-or-less stable country with a more-or-less functional government that didn't host terrorists.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan – that's the US-backed government, not the Taliban – had a constitution stating that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam". I don't recall the US ever asking them even to make a secular constitution, let alone legalize same-sex marriage.
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Well, now I feel bad. My initial reply was dishonest, in that I did not accurately represent my thoughts on the matter. I attempted to construct a maximally charitable interpretation, as well as blindly accept almost-certainly-false factual claims. I wanted the comment to be "fun". In light of your reply---certainly not in the same spirit!---I regret this. Let me attempt to rectify the mistake, being both more honest and more literal:
The first is plainly false. There have not been plagues; there's been a plague (involving no frogs or locusts!). The transmission of that plague (COVID) is not facilitated by anything related to gay marriage. There's been one other disease, of minor import, whose origins lie before the introduction of gay marriage, and in a continent that contains exactly one country to have legalized same-sex marriage (out of 54). The effects of this disease have been minimal in the U.S.; it less qualifies as a "plague" than the common cold. (That was the point of my comment that you asserted was "mind-reading", by the way: that monkeypox is not actually a thing to deserve the name "plague", it only seems that way because the media is going through some sort of perverse "pandemic withdrawal". Thanks for that particularly uncharitable interpretation.)
The second is likewise absurd. Gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. several years after it became obvious that American ventures in the middle east were an enormous, largely unnecessary, resource sink. "Terrorist victories caused gay marriage" is more likely to be a defensible position here.
The third... shit, I already used the word "absurd". Let's go with "risible" this time around. WWIII hasn't happened. The zeal for Ukraine is shared by many countries that don't share the U.S.'s laws on same-sex relationships. For instance, Ukraine. Less glibly, say, Italy. Moreover, the assertion of a general pattern "left wins -> left becomes more active" (relevant both here and for the next point) is probably untrue. The greatest expression of leftist zeal in recent times came after a loss (2016), not a win.
The fourth is just an obvious M&B (which makes it the best claim so far!). The motte is "we managed to find O(1) instances of teachers doing bad things" (at least one of whom got sent to jail for it). The bailey is "this is happening at a large fraction of schools". This particular M&B is enabled by the standard linguistic ambiguity in sentences of the form "[broad class of things without quantifier] [predicate]". This isn't even an interesting M&B.
The best that can be said about these arguments is that, among the obviously untrue claims, they contain claims that are less obviously untrue, and even occasionally claims that have not yet been decisively proven untrue.
Look, none of this is surprising or interesting. An absurd strawman argument turned out to be low-quality: who could have guessed! As you hinted, nothing said here could affect an underlying debate over the consequences of legalizing SSM. But suggesting, for rhetorical effect, that "even the strawman was right", isn't going to lead to truth unless there's a non-deranged argument that the strawman was actually right. At best, you have to abandon the claim in a hurry when called on it; more often, you end up doing what you just did, and attempting to defend claims like "gay marriage caused WWIII".
I kinda want to dig on (4) because I think your view of the situation is not accurate and the promotion of promiscuity and alternative sexual identities isn't at all dog bites man but very much institutional.
But I'll agree with you that this whole frame is a waste of our time unless we go back to discussing actual non broken arguments instead of evaluating how terrible they have to be and still be accurate to be meaningful.
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